Friday, May 4, 2012

Schrödinger. Top scientist. Nasty or nice?

Who here has heard of Schrödinger's cat? Lots I expect, you might not know much more, but lots of people have heard of it.

It never was a real cat tho, thank goodness, poor thing. It is a scientific "thought experiment" by this brillient guy called Schrödinger. Erwin Schrödinger to be exact.

It is all to do with quantum mechanics who don’t actually have ^_^ quantum wrenches as best as I know and it is all quite thought provoking now... and this was going on way back in 1935!

So, to show his point, this very clever guy Schrödinger said to imagine this cat. Locked in a box with some radioactive atoms and a Geiger counter. The Geiger counter is set to break a poison vial and kill the poor cat if it picks up radiation.

So Schrödinger said that his idea was if no one looked to check then after a while the cat would be both alive and dead at the same time.. a “Superposition” until someone looked. It is called the Copenhagen interpretation. If I have gotten this wrong I am sure someone can tell me.

No. My point is what Schrödinger, this really clever guy, was imagining is a horrible, cruel, thing to imagine and no one seems to call him on it – ever. Why would he think that?

He didn’t have to imagine killing some poor cat did he? It could just have easily been a pin and a balloon or a clamp releasing a coin, could't it? Why the cat?

This is just one, maybe more dramatic, example of something I seem to notice every now and again all over. People’s unconscious assumptions being revealed or maybe moving them in one direction than another.

A person will get to some though and you think, “Huh?”, “Why would a person go there, or think that at all?”

I do really wonder if something like this shows something about how a person thinks?

I do wonder if it maybe shows how someone actually values the life of something like a cat, or maybe their attitude to cruelty and suffering. Austria in 1935 must have had some pretty hard attitudes about. Did I mention he was Austrian.

What sort of a person would think to do that if there was an alternative? The balloon idea took me a moment or two. I just thought tho. I guess it would need to be a soundproof box or the “pop” would give it away?